As you can see, the win rate for Lissandra is a whopping 80%! Surely there is something about her that makes her incredibly overpowered, no champion should be anywhere even close to that win percentage. 2nd-5th place are also insanely high percentages. Clearly Riot doesn't know what they are doing when balancing champions around the capabilities of the best players, something that is very important to the professional scene.

Or do they?...

Let's look back on my claims and attempt to counter the apparent flaws that they point out. I have played the game for about 5 years, so I think I have some pretty good insight about game-play that can't be explained by simply looking at raw numbers and stats.

With regards to the top 5 most played champions of the week and their apparent lack of positive win percentage, I think it is because they are either A) fun to play but hard to master, or B) easy to play but are not as strong as other picks. For example, Lee Sin is considered one of the most fun champions to play because of high mobility and opportunity to make flashy plays, but it is very punishing to play him if you are not mechanically sufficient to unlock his potential. Also, if you fall behind your opponent in terms of power, it becomes difficult to rebound and close that gap. Tristana falls under group B. She is very straightforward to play, but it takes a long time for her to become influential in the game and sometimes the game will be over before she reaches her stage of power.

Looking at highest win percent versus lowest win percent, I also have another theory. I think it isn't coincidental that both Brand and Malzahar, the two highest win percentages, are both champions that have hardly undergone changes to their abilities and stats over time. Anything that has been changed was relatively minor and there has been a good amount of time between each change. This means that people who play those champions have had a long time to master them and become familiar with exactly what their limits are. On the other end we have Ryze and Azir. Both of these champions are constantly being changed, reworked, and bug-fixed. Ryze in particular has undergone heavy changes to his abilities and play-style multiple times. Every time he is changed, it is like having to start from scratch for the people that enjoy playing him.

Finally, with the highest win percentages in the Challenger tier statistics, it is easy enough to explain the numbers if I just add a little more to the picture.